Chapter 22

Democracy from Below

Final Draft, August 2009

Most people understand democracy as a system of free and fair elections along with
various kinds of civil rights that make such elections meaningful freedom of
association, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. This kind of democracy is called
representative democracy because the process by which citizens are involved in actually
making the collective decisions carried out by the state is by choosing representatives to
make those decisions.
Representative democracy is, of course, a critical way of translating the ideal of
democracy into practical institutions in a complex society. But it is does not fully capture
the ideal itself and it does not exhaust the empirical ways in which democracy takes place
in American society. Throughout American history there has been a second conception of
democracy which has influenced both the ideals and their practical realization: direct or
participatory democracy in which citizens are directly involved in different ways shaping
public policy and its implementation.

FORMS OF DIRECT CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN DEMOCRACY

Direct citizen participation in democracy takes many different forms. Here is just a partial
list of examples:
1. Juries. In a jury, the task of deciding court cases is handed over to ordinary citizens.
Such decisions are a direct exercise of a critical the power of the state the power to
decide on the guilt or innocence of people accused by the state of crimes and sometimes
decide on their punishments as well, and the power to resolve disputes among parties in
civil cases. In many countries such decisions are made by professionals employed by the
state, trained in the law and judicial rules, but in the United States defendants and
litigants have the option of choosing to have these decisions made by ordinary, fellow
citizens. This does not mean that juries invariably make reasonable decisions. Jurors can
be heavily biased in various ways and can be manipulated by judges and attorneys.
Nevertheless, where the jury system is strong and jurors feel a strong sense of civic
obligation to act in a fair manner, they embody the ideal of equality before the law that is
central to democracy.
2. Referenda. Most laws in American democracy are passed in various kinds of
legislatures city councils, county boards, state legislatures, the U.S. Congress by
elected representatives. But in some states citizens have the right, if they can get a
sufficient number of signatures on a petition, to get a proposed law put on a ballot in
which citizens vote directly the proposed legislation. In some states like California,
Oregon and Washington, hundreds of laws have been passed in this matter. Referenda
have been championed by people who believe that professional politicians are likely to be
beholden to special interests and elites and that ordinary citizens are in a better position to
vote for the public interest. Critics argue that referenda are subject to the same kinds of

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

distortions of money in politics that plague ordinary elections, particularly since

referenda are often on the ballot in special elections with very low turnout. The problems
of rational ignorance that plague voting for candidates can be even more serious in voting
for complex legislative measures, since the cheap information voters receive through
political ads will tend to be simplistic. Referenda are a form of direct democracy, but one
which is potentially easily manipulated by many of the forces that also distort
representative democracy.
3. Open public hearings. Particularly in local political contexts, public hearings can be a
vibrant way for the public to directly affect public policy. When a city council or a school
board holds a public hearing on a controversial matter and hundreds of citizens line up to
speak about the issues, it can be more difficult for the elected officials to make their
decisions through back-room deals. Of course, public hearings can be packed by well
organized small groups that give the impression of much broader support for some side of
an issue than actually exists. They can also sometimes be just a symbolic side-show,
window-dressing to create the appearance of responsiveness. But they can also contribute
to genuine public input that affects decisions of politicians who are prepared to listen and
take them seriously.
4. Public issue campaigns. In a public issue campaign, citizens mobilize petitions, letter
writing, telephone calls and other means of communication to express their views on
some specific issue to public officials. The general idea is that a well-organized campaign
of this sort creates a sense of the strength and passion of public opinion around some
issue. Since elected officials want to be re-elected, they are particularly sensitive to
instances of strongly held views since groups with passionate views are more likely to
mobilize for or against them in electoral campaigns. This sensitivity to the potential of
mobilized constituents also opens public issue campaigns to manipulation by wellfinanced groups, especially under contemporary communications technologies where it is
easy to organize millions of emails.
5. Social protests. Throughout American history people have engaged in public rallies
and demonstrations, and sometimes in civil disobedience in various forms, in an effort to
shape public policy. Public protests potentially do a variety of things: they can bring to
the attention of a passive public a moral issue which has not gotten sufficient attention,
and thus contribute to changing public opinion; they can raise the specter of disruption
and disorder, and thus force elites to take some kind of action; they reaffirm to the
protestors their sense of solidarity and purpose, and provide a context for recruiting new
participants; they can demonstrate the seriousness of commitment of a particular
constituency and thus, like public issue campaigns more generally, make elected officials
concerned about reelection.
Some of the most fundamental political issues in American history have been heavily
shaped by mass movements that engaged in a wide range of peaceful and disruptive
protests. The Abolition Movement against slavery in the 19th century contributed to the
rising sense of political crisis that culminated in the Civil War and the eventual end of
slavery. The Suffragette Movement for the vote for women was a key force that
ultimately resulted in getting men to be willing for women to vote. The Civil Rights
movement used illegal sit-ins in segregated facilities and mass marches to dramatize to
the world the moral failings of racial oppression in the United States. This put

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

tremendous pressure on the Federal Government to intervene in the Southern States and
eventually to pass the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.
Protests and demonstrations do not only have political effects on the most visible stage
of national politics. Many kinds of struggles over local political issues also involve public
protests, sometimes with clear effects on policies. City councils are sometimes quite
responsive to public demonstrations and picketing over zoning decisions and
development projects. Universities introduced Black Studies programs in response to
demands and demonstrations by African-American students. Protests in the late 1990s on
campuses over the use of sweatshop labor in producing apparel with university logos lead
some universities to adopt labor codes of conduct in the contracts for such products.
Countless other examples could be given.
Social protests can serve to advance the principles of equality and democracy, but they
are also tools for highly motivated exclusionary groups to exert pressure on public
officials. At times in American history the KKK used social protests to enforce and
extend laws of racial domination. Social protests are often tools by NIMBY movements
(not in my backyard) which result in placing undesirable public facilities like toxic waste
dumps close to vulnerable, disadvantaged populations who are less able to mount an
effective protest. While probably, on balance, public protests by social movements have
enhanced democracy in America, the record is not unequivocal.
6. Empowered participatory governance. This is the least familiar form in which direct
democracy exists in the United States and it has yet to be given a widely used label.1 In
empowered participatory governance, certain kinds of government activity which would
otherwise be controlled by government bureaucracies or elected officials are delegated to
decentralized bodies in which citizens directly participate in making the decisions. The
oldest form of this kind of empowered participatory governance in the United States is
the New England Town meeting. In the traditional New England town meeting, important
local policy matters are decided not by an elected town council but by citizens in a
meeting who directly vote on things like local taxes, town spending and town ordinances.
Mostly as communities grew larger and more heterogeneous, and as issues of local
government became more complex, this kind of direct democracy has disappeared. In the
last decades of the twentieth century, however, new and innovative forms of empowered
participatory governance have emerged. As we will see below, this potentially creates
opportunities for a much more deeply engaged process of democratic citizenship in
solving pressing and difficult problems.
All of these constitute forms of democracy from below in which citizens attempt to
directly influence the shape of public policies. Mostly they have the character of either
having very limited scope of action as in juries or of primarily being a way of
applying periodic external pressure on the real centers of power. Only the last,
empowered participatory governance, constitutes a way of bringing citizens inside of the
decision-making process of government in a regular and on-going way.
1

The term empowered participatory governance to describe these kinds of institutional arrangements was
coined by Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright in Deepening Democracy: institutional innovations in
empowered participatory governance (London and New York: Verso, 2003).

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

The rest of this chapter will explore these new forms of democracy from below. We
will begin by explaining how this kind of direct democracy can fit into a modern,
complex, political system. The key to this is understanding the relationship between
passing a law and implementing a public policy. This will be followed by a
discussion of a striking example of this new institutional form: the development of urban
participatory democracy in one section of the city of Boston.

THE PROBLEM OF TURNING LEGISLATION INTO FUNCTIONING POLICIES

The normal, simple way that most people think of democratic government is that laws get
passed by elected legislatures and then they are carried out by administrative
organizations that implement the laws that have been passed. There is, however, an
immediate problem which this simple idea faces: what is called implementation of a
law often involves creating a very wide range of concrete rules and programs. This is an
issue even in cases where legislatures pass laws that seem very straightforward and
uncomplicated. Consider, for example, what happens when a law is passed which says
the speed limit is 65 mph on highways. Here the administrative task of implementing the
law is fairly straightforward: putting up speed limit signs and instructing police officers
to enforce the limit. But even in this case there are still issues in implementation that are
not specified in the law itself: how strict or lax will the enforcement be? Will motorists be
stopped if they are driving at 67 mph, 70 mph, 73 mph, or what? How many police will
patrol the highways and what technologies will they use to measure driving speed? These
decisions made after the law is passed in the legislature will determine how rigorously
and effectively the rule is actually enforced. Anyone who has traveled through many
states knows that there are some places where the speed limit is quite rigorously
enforced, and others in which you can consistently exceed the speed limit by 15 mph
without worrying even though the laws on the books are the same.
Many pieces of legislation pose enormously greater problems than speed limits, and
the distinction between passing the legislation and implementing the actual policy begins
to break down. Think of legislation that provides funding for urban redevelopment, or
public transportation, or education, or legislation that protect endangered species or
regulate pollution. In these instances legislation creates a program with general guidelines
and principles, but this is still very far from actual, functioning policies in the world.
The traditional way of solving this problem of implementation is to empower an
administrative agency to create the detailed rules and programs and put them concretely
into practice. The term that is used for this sort of approach is bureaucracy. The style of
implementation that corresponds to bureaucracy is what is often referred to as
command-and-control. The procedure is this: At the top of the bureaucracy are political
appointees who are responsible to the elected executive of the government the president
in the case of the federal government, governors in the state, mayors in cities. The
political heads of the bureaucracy oversee the process of rule setting and implementation.
Often they set up special advisory panels of experts to help with this rule-setting task. In
some instances these panels include representatives of powerful interest groups, but
sometimes they are just experts of one sort or another. Below this political directorate of
the bureaucracy are professional, career civil servants who do most of the practical work.
For example, in the case of the endangered species act these include scientists of various

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

sorts responsible for studying the problem and identifying endangered species, field
agents who monitor sites, and of course lots of people we commonly call bureaucrats
who manage the paperwork involved in all of this.
This kind of system is called command-and-control because the rules are imposed
from above by centralized command, and then the bureaucratic staff controls the practical
implementation of these commands. Of course there are lots of variations, but this is the
basic idea. This kind of structure is used in most policy areas: pollution control, health
and safety regulation, welfare policy, public housing, parks and recreation, community
development, and so on.
Suppose that legislation is passed to give cities funds for urban development
projects to deal with the problem of deterioration and blight in parts of a city. The money
can be used for a very wide range of purposes: improving urban infrastructure like
sewers, lighting and streets; demolishing dilapidated buildings and providing subsidies of
different sorts to build apartments or office buildings; renovating parks, libraries and
other public amenities; improved public transportation; etc. The question then becomes
how the city decides precisely what sorts of things to do. Typically there is a planning
office in the city, and often for big projects a special commission will be set up by the
planning department to develop the basic contours of a long term plan. This commission
will consist of experts from the planning department, possibly other city officials,
sometimes civic leaders of different sorts, sometimes outside experts. Initial plans will be
prepared and public hearings organized. Proposals for particular projects will be reviewed
by the commission. Eventually a general plan is devised from this process, and then
specific projects begun. The funds are allocated and the projects are monitored (more or
less effectively) by city officials.
Democracy enters this bureaucratic process in three ways: First, the bureaucracy is
accountable to the elected executive, and thus there is an electoral constraint on the
policies implemented by the bureaucrats. Second, in at least some of the rule-setting and
planning processes, public input is solicited, and sometimes this has a democratic
character. And third, the bureaucracy is itself subject to rules and courts, so if you feel
that a bureaucracy has implemented a rule that violates the principles of some law, you
can sue the bureaucracy in court. All of these are important; it is surely worse to live in a
world in which government bureaucracy cannot be challenged in courts, in which there is
no open public input into implementation decisions, and in which the leadership of the
bureaucracy is not accountable to elected officials. Still, the democratic constraints often
seem quite weak. Many people see government bureaucracy as unresponsive and
undemocratic. What is worse, because of the capacity of powerful interests and wellfunded lobbyists to influence centralized bureaucracies, it often happens that the process
of policy implementation gets captured by special interests, and this further erodes their
democratic character.

AN ALTERNATIVE: EMPOWERED PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE

Empowered participatory governance is an alternative way of creating concrete
implementations of legislation for some kinds of public policies. The basic idea is this:
There are many public policies, including national policies, in which the actual
implementation of the policy can be significantly decentralized to quite local units and in

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

which ordinary citizens can become actively involved in working out the practical details
of implementation. The idea here is not simply to remove certain policies from
centralized bureaucracies, but to create new participatory mechanisms for citizens to
become directly involved in policy formation and policy implementation. This will be
especially feasible in instances in which citizens have formed civic action groups of
various sorts engaged in trying to solve in practical ways various kinds of problems faced
by their communities. The trick is to figure out institutional arrangements in which such
civic associations can become actively linked to government administration in ways that
genuinely empower them to shape the process of rule implementation and program
development.
The United States has a very long tradition of civic activism and voluntary
association. The 19th century French social commentator, Alex De Tocqueville, saw this
penchant for Americans to join voluntary associations as one of the defining
characteristics of American society, one of the things that contributed to the vibrancy of
our democracy. Such associations contributed to a dense, collectively organized civil
society in the 19th century and into the 20th.
Many sociologists believe we think incorrectly that there has been a sharp
decline in such participation in voluntary associations over the last 50 years and that this
has lead to a serious weakening of civil society in the US.2 What has for sure happened is
a decline in certain traditional forms of association especially organizations like
fraternal clubs and traditional civic associations but there has also been a rise in a new
kind of association, grass roots associations organized around particular social,
environmental, and political issues. Often these associations function mainly as pressure
groups, protesting policies and putting pressure on public officials. This is certainly the
traditional way that civic associations play a role in democracy. But in halting and
uneven ways they have also taken on a more energetic role in the actual process of
governance.
The best way to understand what this is all about is to look at a particular example
in some detail. We will then discuss the broader implications of this kind of participation
for a revitalization of democracy.

THE DUDLEY STREET NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE3

The Dudley Street neighborhood is an area with about 23,000 residents located two miles
from downtown Boston. Demographically it is a racially and ethnically diverse
community made up primarily of African Americans, Hispanics and Cape Verdeans.

For discussions of the possible decline in civic associations in the United States, see Robert W. Putnam,
Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) and Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: from
membership to Management (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004)

This account draws heavily from a superb account of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative by Peter
Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope: the fall and rise of an urban neighborhood (Boston: South End
Press, 1994) and from a documentary film, Holding Ground. For additional information on this experience,
see the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative website, www.dsni.org.

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

Only about 4% are white.4 Economically, it is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the
city of Boston with unemployment and poverty rates roughly twice as high as for the city
of Boston as a whole.
In the early 1980s the Dudley Street neighborhood was also one of the physically
most devastated parts of the city. As a result of highly discriminatory urban housing
policies in the 1960s and 1970s, chronic neglect by the city, and a persistent problem of
arson, by 1985 21% of the parcels of land (1,300 parcels) in the area were vacant. The
Boston Arson Prevention Commission argued in 1985 that much of this arson was
probably the result of development interests wanting to displace people from the area.
The Commission wrote, Many of the buildings which have burned in this area [in 1985]
were among the approximately 75 abandoned buildings which area residents would like
to see developed by and for local, low-income residents. Other fires have occurred in
buildings currently occupied by low-income tenants that appear destined for Condo
ConversionIt is obvious that this increase in serious fires in the Sav-Mor area [part of
the Dudley Street neighborhood] is directly related to the increased speculation due to the
[Boston Redevelopment Authority] Dudley Square Revitalization plan.5 The vacant lots
created by abandonment and arson became a dumping ground for all kinds of trash and
garbage. Private contractors for city garbage collection routinely but illegally used
some of the lots as trash transfer stations. Residents of Boston also dumped refuse in the
area. Streets were littered with abandoned cars.
This was the context in which the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative was
founded in 1985. A private foundation, The Riley Foundation, had been involved in
making grants for various kinds of projects in poor sections of Boston for some time. In
1984 it helped create the Dudley Advisory Group to formulate a broad strategy for
development for the area. This group had roughly 30 regular members from various
community organizations and agencies connected to the area. The group met regularly to
formulate proposals and create a clear agenda which would facilitate funding from the
Riley Foundation and other sources. It formally renamed itself the Dudley Street
Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in January 1985.
In February 1985 the DSNI organized a large public meeting to present its ideas to
the community. The organizers of the meeting fully expected to be greeted with
enthusiasm by local residents. After all, they were proposing a broad agenda for
neighborhood improvement and for the infusion of significant funds for a variety of
constructive community development projects. Instead, they were greeted with
considerable skepticism and even hostility. Some of the neighborhood people at the
meeting expressed deep resentment at being told what was best for their community by
do-gooder outsiders. As one of the participants in the meeting declared, Who the hell
are you people and what do you want?....Who is Riley? Why should we trust you?6
Many people were especially incensed by the composition of the proposed 23-member
4

Data are for the year 2000, reported in the Dudley Neighborhood Profile, June 2003, prepared for the
Urban Village Working Group, DSNI, available at www.dsni.org.
5

Quoted in Medoff and Sklar, p. 68, from the City of Boston Arson Prevention Commission, Report to the
BRA on the Status of Arson in Dudley Square.
6

Quoted in Medoff and Sklar, op.cit. p.53

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

governing board of the DSNI, which was dominated by outsiders and had only 4
positions reserved for community members.
Many residents were extremely cynical towards these kinds of lofty plans for
neighborhood revitalization. They had heard such things before, but nothing much
changed. In the specific case of the Dudley Street neighborhood in 1985 this general
cynicism had been intensified by the recent release of the city of Bostons own
development plans for the area. As described by Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, the
Boston Redevelopment Authoritys Dudley Square Plan was a classic urban
development project that would lead to gentrification of housing and a large-scale
displacement of existing low-income residents:
The BRA proposed a New Town strategy with a $750 million complex of office towers, hotels,
housing, historic parks and light manufacturing in the northern Dudley areas. The plan called for
building high-, moderate- and low-income housing with home ownership opportunities for
families with incomes as low as $20,000. That wasnt very low. Bostons median family income
was only $22,2000 in 1984.Many saw the New Town strategy as the old urban removal
The Bra admitted that its strategy could lead to displacement of existing residents, the gentrification
of existing single-family neighborhoods, and jobs for new residents at the expense of current
7
residents.

Given that the DSNI was dominated by educated white outsiders, it was perfectly
reasonable for residents of the Dudley Street area to think that in some way the DSNI the
part of this larger scheme.
In a situation like this one might have predicted that the organizers of the meeting
and the financial backers of the project would have abandoned their efforts, feeling that
they were not wanted by the community. Instead, they acknowledged that they had
screwed up by not involving ordinary members of the community from the start. So,
instead of retreating, they proposed that the whole process be restarted on a new footing,
with a new governing board in which a majority of the seats would be held by people
directly elected by the community:
there would be a 31-member board, with a resident majority a minimum of 12 community
members and 4 additional spots designated for residents. The multiracial, multiethnic character of
DSNI was reaffirmed. Equal minimum representation was provided for the neighborhoods four
major cultures Black, Cape Verdean, Latino and White rather than representation based simply
numerically on Dudleys population. Equal minimum representation was chosen to strengthen
collective action and underscore the common stake of all people in rebuilding Dudley. The Riley
Foundation, the dollars beyond DSNI at this point, never sought a seat on the board and, in keeping
with the spirit of community control, it never occurred to the DSNI members to propose that they
8
do.

The result of this restructuring was the emergence of a community organization that was
genuinely controlled by the members of the community and whose projects grew out of
intense discussion within the community over their most pressing priorities.
At this point the DSNI was already an interesting example of an inclusive
community association working in a democratic manner for improving the conditions of
7

Medoff and Sklar, op. cit., p. 51-52

Medoff and Sklar, op.cit. p.57

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

life for people in a poor area of a large city. But it was not yet, really, an instance of
deepening democratic through empowered participatory governance, for it still had no
systematic relationship to city government. This was to change over the next several
years.
Ray Flynn was elected Mayor of Boston in 1984 after a bitter election campaign
against a popular Black politician, Mel King. In the aftermath of the election, Flynn was
eager to find allies in the black community that could ease some of the racial tensions
generated by the election. The DSNI suited this purpose well. While it is probably also
the case that Flynn did see the DSNI as a constructive effort to do something positive in
one of the most blighted parts of the city, the level of city support was also clearly
motivated by political considerations. The activists involved in the DSNI were not nave
about this, and there were concerns about being used by the city, but nevertheless they
saw this as an opportunity to increase the real power of the association and its capacity to
accomplish meaningful change.
The pivotal steps that consolidated a new kind of relationship with city government
occurred in 1987 and 1988. Two things were especially important. The first was the
adoption of a comprehensive strategy of participatory community planning to generate
both a long-term vision for the revitalization of the community and an inventory of
concrete plans for specific development projects. Participatory planning meant creating a
community planning committee and the holding a long series of community-wide
meetings in which both visions and projects were discussed. The result of this process
was the Dudley Street Neighborhood Comprehensive Revitalization Plan which was
subsequently adopted by the city as the official framework for future development of the
community.
The second decisive development was a solution to the problem of how to control
the 1300 parcels of vacant land in the Dudley Street area. The disposition of this vacant
land for constructive community purposes was critical for the revitalization plan. The city
of Boston owned a significant number of these parcels, and many of the private parcels
were delinquent in paying taxes to the city and in various stages of the process of
foreclosure, but much of the land remained in private hands. The question was: who
would control the actual disposition of this land and what would be the process through
which it could be used for community development? The solution was dramatic,
controversial and unprecedented. It had two components: granting the DSNI the power of
eminent domain by the city over the acquisition and disposition of the land, and creating
a community land trust for the long-term ownership of the land.
Initially the residents of the community were very suspicious of the idea of the
DSNI having the power of eminent domain, for in the past eminent domain had been used
by planning authorities to displace people from their homes in order to demolish existing
structures for purposes of development. Often this resulted in low-income housing
being replaced by office buildings and luxury apartments. The Dudley Street
Neighborhood Initiative was committed to development without displacement, and after
all of this was explained in a series of community meetings, the community
enthusiastically embraced the idea a community-controlled power of eminent domain.

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

10

The idea of community land trusts was completely unfamiliar to most people. Most
people assume that ownership of buildings and ownership of land go together. What a
community land trust does is break apart these two aspects of real estate. This enables the
community to remove from the pressures of the market the land, and therefore exert
significant control over the price at which the buildings on that land are sold. This
provides a way of building affordable subsidized housing and then ensuring that it
remains affordable as it is bought and sold over time. The DSNI set up a new nonprofit
association, Dudley Neighborhood Incorporated, as a community land trust authorized by
the Boston Redevelopment Authority to acquire lots via the power of eminent domain.
By the end of 1988 these elements were in place. In the years that followed, the
DSNI embodied the ideal of empowered participatory governance by involving members
of the Dudley Street community in the actual exercise of power over a very wide range of
decisions concerning the use of resources and land. As summarized on the DSNI website,
by 2008 over half of the 1,300 vacant lots had been rehabilitated for homes, gardens,
parks, an orchard, playgrounds, schools, community centers and a Town Commons. Over
400 new homes for low-income people had been built and over 500 housing units
rehabilitated.9 The demographic profile and economic conditions of the residents
themselves had not changed much. Average incomes are still very low and the
community is still composed largely of minorities. But it is no longer a blighted
disintegrated crime-ridden community.
Of course, the scale of these projects would not have been possible without the
infusion of a great deal of outside funding, both from the government and from private
foundations of various sorts. However, the level of funding alone would not have
generated such consistent positive changes on the ground. This depended on the robust
forms of participation and community empowerment through which these funds were
used. Gus Newport, the executive director of the DSNI from 1988-1992, describes the
process this way: The chief lesson from Dudley Street is that communities need to have
complete control over the planning process. That doesnt mean that you cant use
professionals. But you must remember that the people living there are the experts.
Community people are usually taken for granted. But here they look over everything and
analyze it. They ask a lot of questions. Even people with little education. There are
people with little education who have great ideas.10

WIDER PROSPECTS FOR DEMOCRACY FROM BELOW

The last quarter of the 20th Century was a period of general retreat in the United States
from the democratic ideal of an affirmative state actively engaged in solving collective
problems. One part of this retreat was the promotion of a wide variety of schemes to
make various aspects of the state function more like markets. Sometimes this meant
simply turning over to the private sector various state responsibilities, but other times it
9

http://www.dsni.org/timeline.shtml

10

Quoted by Jay Walljasper The Dudley Street Example Citizen at Large, June 2000
(www.consciouschoice.com/2000/cc1306/citizen1306.html)

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

11

involved the creation of public-private partnerships for carrying out public functions.
Such partnerships had been in existence the 1960s as a way of involving various kinds of
community groups and other associations of civil society in implementing public policy.
While in the neoliberal era such partnerships often reduced democratic accountability,
there are occasions when it contributed to the expansion of opportunities for real
democratic empowerment.
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative is one prominent of example where this
occurred, but it is not the only example. To list just a few other examples:
The Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program. This program allocated in
the early 1990s $400 million in public funds for Minneapolis neighborhood groups
to spend over a twenty year period in a variety of improvement projects.11 While
there was considerable variation across the city in the level of energetic
participation, in at least some neighborhoods there was very active citizen
involvement in formulating plans and implementing projects.
Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), an affiliated program of the
Industrial Areas Foundation in San Antonio.12 COPS, founded in 1974, is one of the
oldest projects of community-based participatory planning in the United States.
Organizationally, it is a coalition of grassroots associations rooted in the MexicanAmerican community in San Antonio. COPS organizes an elaborate series of
meetings of residents in homes, churches and schools to discuss the kinds of
projects they would like. Initially this is an open-ended discussion, which of course
means that residents want many more projects done than are possible. But this is
still important for it makes people aware of the range of projects that are needed.
Once this list is formulated, there is then an extended process of trimming,
prioritizing, bargaining, discussions of which projects to put off for the future, etc.
Those discussion take place is a variety of venues in which active citizen
participation plays a vital role. The process culminates in a plan agreed upon by
community leaders and city council representatives.
Community Policing in Chicago.13 This is a very different example. The general
idea of community policing is for police departments to operate in such a way
that they cultivate closer, less antagonistic ties to people in the community. In
Chicago in the 1990s there was an attempt to enhance the quality of this
engagement by creating regular community beat meetings in which residents
could interrogate the police and help set concrete policing priorities for their
neighborhood. Each month the police would then have to report back to this
participatory forum about what they had done in response to these priorities.
11

Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung, Empowered Participation in Urban Governance: the Minneapolis
Neighborhood Revitalization Program, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, volume
30:3, September 2006, pp. 638-55.

12

For a discussion of COPS, see Mark Warren. Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize
American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001

13

Archon Fund. Empowered Participation: reinventing Urban democracy (Princeton University Press,
2006).

Chapter 22. Democracy from below

12

Many other examples could be given. And, of course, many more examples could
be given of attempts at creating forms of direct community democratic empowerment
which fail. While it is impossible to have a real census of such initiatives so that we could
measure the rate of success, it is almost certain that the vast majority of attempts at
building democratic empowerment from below fail. This is hardly surprising since most
such initiatives occur against a hostile, unsupportive background. But even when there is
some real support from the centers of power, building this kind of community democratic
capacity may be difficult. Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, in reflecting on the lessons from
the tremendous success of the Dudley Street process, write:
Communities that are unorganized, have forged little or no consensus as to what they want to see
done and have not yet identified resources to bring to the table cannot be expected to participate as
equal partners with government and private sector leadersThe result of this premature partnership
is almost always failure.
To forge effective partnership the community must be organized well enough to be an equal
partner at the table, not a junior partner. It must participate out of strength, so that it can pursue its
own agenda and not be suffocated or cooperated by the agenda of others..
Though Boston city officials claim to have developed partnerships with other neighborhoods
based on the DSNI precedent, the results have been mixed at best because no other neighborhood
has yet won the community control necessity to make that kind of partnership work.14

For these innovative forms of empowered participatory democracy from below to

flourish, therefore, it is essential for there to be autonomous representative community
organizations in civil society capable of sustaining the arduous process of participatory
planning. If such associations do not exist and if progressive city officials are serious
about democracy from below, then, in Medoff and Sklars words, they need to give the
community time and resources to organize itself and to create a representative community
organization.15 Since city officials will rarely be interested in fostering this kind of
autonomous popular power, the expansion of the possibility of democracy from below
will almost always depend upon the vision, commitment and skills of activists to build
such capacity through community struggles and confrontations with local centers of
power.

14

Medoff and Sklar, Streets of Hope, pp. 276-77

15

Medoff and Sklar, Streets of Hope, pp. 277